Good-bye, Columbus Day. Hello, Italian Heritage Day. Starting this year, the city-recognized holiday on the second Monday in October will no longer be named after the 15th-century European explorer whom many Italian-Americans celebrated as a heroic, cultural icon, and whom critics lambasted as an enslaver of Indigenous peoples and an emblem of violent white supremacy.

Local legislators took that unanimous holiday-renaming vote Monday evening during the regular bimonthly meeting of the full Board of Alders. The virtual meeting took place online via the Zoom videoconferencing platform. City Services and Environmental Policy (CSEP) Committee Chair and East Rock Alder Anna Festa urged her colleagues to support the vote by referring back to an August public hearing on the matter.